“Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” – Andy Warhol
I am stealing this quote from Devi’s blog earlier in the week—or last week rather. I am stealing it because I need it myself. Just get it done. This is more crucial than I can say. I remember being extorted to write daily, to make it a habit. And yet it took me my own long years to learn this, and then only to learn it sporadically, for the stretch of a draft, but not longer.
I am in between drafts now, in between books, really, though there will be some more work to do on the book that’s being released into the world (well, into the hands of prospective editors) this week. But it is, more or less, done, and while it must be ushered through the next long journey, that ushering is something different than writing per se.
And as Marge Piercy said, “The real writer is one who really writes.” The rest is myth and glitter, drama and fakery.
Of course, the real writer is, sometimes, not writing. But a kind of depression looms in the face of that silenced conversation with oneself and, really, with all the storytellers who populate one’s life.
I have been thinking about whom I could ask to blurb my book, friends who are big-name writers, and what I realize is that there are people I think of as my close friends, people I think of as residing in a downstairs room with built-in bookshelves. Famous writers, living and dead, who must surely love me as I love them, who know how greatly they’ve inspired and assisted me with this book, who would love to put their praise and names on its cover beside my own.
It is a shock to remember that they do not know me, or my book, at all. And I recall something from the publication of my first book. Being a reader is like house-sitting. You explore their wonderful house, uncovering all sorts of magical items. You read their books, pick up and dust their tchotchkes, study their lush plants, the soaps and tubes in their bathrooms. You imagine yourself into their lives and come to feel close to them.
They, meanwhile—the people for whom you are housesitting—are like writers. They are gone while you are staying at their house and the only sign they have of the intimacy you’ve felt is the things that are out of place, the slight disorder in their own familiar routine.
When we become writers, we imagine that we will experience the flip side of the intimacy of our readers, but very often it is only a missing earring, a chipped vase.
In any case, what we must do as writers is build that intimacy instead with our characters, with our words, with the habit of facing the blank page and the miracle that it will call something out of itself if we insist. Our job is to insist.
Elizabeth Stark is the author of the novel Shy Girl (FSG, Seal Press) and co-director and co-writer of several short films, including FtF: Female to Femme and Little Mutinies (both distributed by Frameline). She earned an M.F.A. from Columbia University in Creative Writing. Currently the lead mentor and teacher at the Book Writing World, she’s taught writing and literature at UCSC, Pratt Institute, the Peralta Colleges, Hobart & William Smith Colleges and St. Mary’s College. She’s just finished a novel about Kafka.